It is strange to be reading so many stories about premium-priced green power programs and net metering programs for excess power right alongside stories about utilities performing record numbers of shut-offs for non-payment.
This week’s Camp for Climate Action is actually a training event, taking place within sight of the City of London and preparing activists for the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen.
The camp aims to provide volunteers with information on four aspects of Climate Change:
1) education
2) direct action
3) sustainable living
4) building a movement to effectively tackle climate change.
It’s that second point that has brought five representatives of the Cree First Nations to the camp – they are highlighting the involvement of British corporations in the tar sand extraction taking place in Canada. A spokesman from Fort Chipewyan said that ‘British companies such as BP and Royal Bank of Scotland … are driving this project, which is having such devastating effects on our environment and communities.’
The Cree representatives say that the tar sand mining destroys ancient forestry, contaminates water systems with toxins and disrupts wildlife, which then threatens the aborigine lifestyle of the First Nations. The spokesman said it was ‘… the biggest environmental crime on the planet’ and that it was able to continue because very few people in Britain realised it was happening. BP and Shell oil companies are both involved in extracting oil from the tar sands of Alberta – the oil is removed by using water under intense pressure, a process which uses up natural resources, requires high levels of energy and produces higher CO2 emissions. Royal Bank of Scotland is now part-owned by the British government following its financial difficulties and is being targeted by the Cree representatives because it has been a major funder of tar sand extraction schemes.
The exact site of the camp is not yet known although campers are already arriving in the Greater London Area – the village will ‘spring up’ overnight on Wednesday and open on Thursday: the organisers fear the police may try to prevent the camp being built if they have advance warning of its location.
Alberta courtesy of fotographix.ca at Flickr under a creative commons licence
Before heading home to face the anger at the now infamous health care “town halls,” Congress rushed through an extension to what was then considered a popular program: Cash for Clunkers. Then, like much of the August break, Cash for Clunkers went sideways as critics picked apart the program’s weaknesses, consumers stopped showing up with so many clunkers, and dealers started making noise about something as simple as when they might actually get the rebate money that the government promised.
So, what do you do when you have a poorly-conceived and ill-managed project winding down (Clunkers expires at 8 p.m. EST on August 24)? Kick off another one, even more poorly thought out, and gloss it with an equally catchy name: Cash for Refrigerators.
Beginning in the fall, consumers will have access—through existing state-level energy efficiency incentive programs —$300 million in stimulus funds made available as rebates for energy efficient appliances. Read the rest of this entry »
The Department of Energy (DOE) announced today it will fund $27.6 million for next generation carbon capture methods using geologic storage. The funding includes monitoring and evaluating CO2 storage, including risk assessment and verification of sequestration. Suspiciously, this announcement follows on the heals of last week’s State Department’s approval of a pipeline from Canada’s tar sands to the United States. The 1,000 mile crude oil pipeline will run from Hardisty, Alberta, to Superior, Wisconsin.
19 projects will be funded by the DOE. John Litynski, sequestration division director at DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, explains:
These projects represent specific areas in monitoring CO2, both in the subsurface and at the surface, that helps to meet our goals to account for 99 percent of CO2 once it’s injected. We’ve actually been doing monitoring for quite a while — ever since the program started 10 years ago, but we’ve been doing some field activities with the regional partnerships and now we want to make an effort to start looking at verification and accounting protocols after the field work. We’ve selected the new projects to fill in the gaps.
The Australian government’s ruling coalition has come to terms on an agreement that would quadruple the renewable energy target set by the previous government in 2001 and is in line with the renewables target set by the European Union in 2008. The coal-centric Australia currently gets eight percent of its electricity from renewables, including hydroelectric power. Read the rest of this entry »
Subsistence farmers in Bolivia have been given help to change their technology – moving away from pipe and sprinkle irrigation systems to an aeons-old technique of hand-built raised clay platforms that are surrounded by canals.
The platforms, called camellones, can be up to eight feet above the level of the fields they support, have two purposes: they protect seeds and crops from being washed away by floods and the water stored in the canals can be used when the river system is low, to irrigate the crops.
The camellone construction system is pre-Columbian dating back to around 1000BC to AD1400, which shows that communities, then, as now, faced the problem of flooding succeeded by drought. And this may have been one of the causes of collapse for those ancient cultures, because when workers were diverted from building and maintaining agricultural systems to joining armies, there may have been famines. In modern day Bolivia, serious floods in the past three years have caused more than £119 million of damage to agricultural systems. It’s hoped that with climate change driving more river flooding and more drought, reverting to old technology could help communities cope with water levels rising even as rains reduce.
Around 400 families have been supported by local and international charities to create camellones in five areas to grow corn, cassava and rice. The first results look good, as the Amazonian floods have now receded, and where the nutrients in the soil would normally be washed back into the river, the platforms have remained above the floods and conserved the rich vegetative topsoil that can grow better crops than the sandy subsoil.
If you’re thinking it all sounds too good to be true, you could very well be right. This kind of preliminary report on an agricultural or technological ‘throw-back’ is often followed by a bleak silence. The reasons for this are often more political than environmental and include:
1) The cost of investment in building and maintaining such systems, which is subsided by charities for three or five years and then the charity funding moves on and nobody is motivated to carry on the work
2) The transfer of local power from hierarchical systems (which are often based on government or international aid and support) to individuals who may be low ranking, illiterate and unable to drive forward change outside their own behaviour
3) The failure to recognise that while subsistence farmers claim to want to be self-sufficient, such projects tend to recruit the young, healthy and confident: all it takes is illness in the family, a child to win a scholarship or a vehicle or house to need substantial repairs and that family is likely to move away from growing crops to eat back into growing cash crops that generate income to meet their needs.
4) Calls on local labour – if a road or resort is built nearby, all the available labour may be pulled from agriculture to work on the cash-generating project.
What such projects need is a longer term investment, along with social support to ensure that the community recognises that the new systems can deliver everything that cash crops or illegal forestry did.
Bolivan market courtesy of PJFurlong06 at Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence
It’s well known that politics is dirty, but recently, anti-climate bill tactics have sunk to a new low: forging letters written by senior citizens against the Waxman-Markey climate bill.The Markey Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming is investigating the fake letters sent by the lobbying firm Bonner & Associates claiming the elderly were opposed to the climate bill for fear it would raise utility costs. Five more suspected forgeries were released today bringing the grand total to 58 letters under investigation. Read the rest of this entry »
The Department of Energy on Thursday released the details of a new $2.3 billion manufacturing tax credit, enacted earlier this year as part of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The tax credit of 30% is for investment in new renewable energy manufacturing facilities and re-equipped or expanded facilities.
The idea behind the stimulus is to grow the domestic manufacturing industry for clean energy, stimulating economic growth, creating jobs, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and building a long-term strategy for addressing them. Read the rest of this entry »
This week’s protestors all have similar objectives – they want better local land use, and more consideration for the needs and behaviours of many different forms of land user.
Around 3,000 Utahns marched on their state Capitol last weekend, to protest federal control of their open spaces. Their complaint is that forests and other lands are increasing being closed or having only restricted access and their protest is staged both against the federal government and environmental protestors who ask for areas of land to be turned into reserves. The protest attracted a wide range of people from farmers and hunters through to walkers and those who enjoy off-road riding: many protestors rode motorcycles, four-wheelers or other forms of all-terrain vehicle. The local Representative Mike Noel, said, ‘If you want to see what it’s like to live in a socialist regime, go to southern Utah.’
In Brittany, France, environmental groups have launched a range of protests from petitions, to placards, to demand for new legislation to remove algae from local beaches. The problem is not just unsightliness or odour – the concentration of the algae caused a horse to die, and its rider to collapse, after they both fell victim to fumes given off by the rotting material. An autopsy confirmed that the fumes killed the horse, and the rider’s owner has started legal action against ‘person unknown’ – but the assumption is that if the case gets to court, it will be local farmers who will be the subject of the action. A local environmental activist says that intensive farming practises cause chemicals from animal feed to enter local water supplies and that these chemicals cause the toxic gases in the rotting algae. Local authorities say they have made efforts to reduce the quantity of farm effluent that is released into the sea. Some towns have spent a lot of municipal money on algae reduction schemes because they fear it puts off tourists. However, scientists say it isn’t a systemic problem and there is no widespread danger to beach users.
In Puget Sound, a dock isn’t being built. The water reserve on Maury Island has been a battleground for years – Glacier Northwest wanted to build a pier which would support pipelines carrying fine sand out onto the water to load barges. Local protestors were ready to chain themselves to the construction cranes or form a barrage of kayaks to block access to the pier, but a federal judge made it unnecessary – ruling that such projects needed stricter environmental review. It wasn’t enough, ruled Judge Martinez, to consider the individual impact of a building or development, the cumulative effect of all built and planned building had to be factored into the equation. He went on to say, ‘No single project or human activity has caused depletion of the salmon runs or the near-extinction of the … orca, or the general degradation of the marine environment of Puget Sound. Yet every project has the potential to incrementally increase the burden upon the species and the Sound.’ Local residents, who’ve been fighting the development, were jubilant, but Glacier Northwest feel the judgement is unsound because it means they must remove the sand with trucks which means more environmental impact on roads and use of fossil fuels.
Puget Sound courtesy of Brian Teutsch at Flickr under a creative commons licence
Lack of foreign investments owing to the global financial crisis and its own negotiating stance at climate talks could throw back India’s schedule to implement plans of setting up large scale solar energy projects.
India is looking to invest billions of dollars in setting to large scale solar and wind energy projects. These projects are essential for meeting the growing power demands and also for countering any demands from the developed countries to reduce carbon emissions.
India currently generates only 3 percent or 12,000 MW of its electricity from renewable sources, mostly comprising of wind energy while solar energy contributes only 2 MW. The government recently announced ambitious plan to boost electricity generation from solar energy to 20,000 MW by 2030.
Tapping solar energy is essential for India as it’s power plants are in short supplies of coal. Thus for various reasons ranging from energy security and international pressures to reduce its carbon emissions to environmental problems related to conventional energy sources, India has announced these massive plans to expand its solar energy infrastructure. Read the rest of this entry »
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